Friday, January 15, 2010

If you excited about windows 7 yet you cannot move into it perhaps you have one legacy application wont work with windows 7 and holding you up to move on , such as Cisco VPN client and etc.

If this is the case keep reading XP mode will be the rescue….. What is XP mode anyways? IT is virtual PC , XP professional is running on top of. The idea behind it , is clear MS wants you to move on to Windows 7 and run your legacy application on top of Virtual PC and all it is simple to configure and no additional cost (-:, you will love it for sure.

download click on it to see if your PC is compatible if you see NO don't panic yet (-:

You will need to go to your BIOS by pressing F2 or any other proper key while your PC/laptop is rebooting. In the BIOS locate to see virtualization is enabled under CPU advance settings ( this must be enabled)

After installing both files you will notice the virtual XP is already been created , login with password you created. I recommend creating your own account, renaming the XP VPC etc, adding into domain if you have too, etc.

I recommend shutting it down and adjusting the memory from 512 to 1024 least to make XP going faster.

And finally I think the best way touse it not to overload with un-necassary stuff just runs the apps wont run within Win07, rest you should be able to do it on Win07.

If you start playing with it you will start liking it and MS has given great option to us to move into Win07.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

After migrating domain controllers on ESX environment (-:, ps: I have tried to convince for hyperV but did not worked out in this one.) we saw time on the domain controllers were off and made some adjustment to make PDC happy. I wanted to share here what we have done to fix the issue.

if you are not familiar with time service on the PDC emulator I recommend start reading it from Ace Fekay’s blog ( AD MVP ) excellent & well written article.

My issue started as “outlook is sending e-mails , 6hr behind the current time”

I think in the process of thinking locally, Outlook is a software installed on a workstation OS ( winXP, Vista, Win7 etc) and it reads time from OS itself

Workstation OS ( client PC’s) is talking to domain controller they authenticated against. The domain controllers gets their time (Sync) from PDC emulator ( domain controller holds the PDC emulator role) and finally PDC gets ( should configured to external time source) its time from external time source.

Outlook----sync------> Work Station OS----sync----->DC

DC----sync--------> PDC

PDC-------sync------>External Time source.

Ok now back to the issue, how to configure PDC to sync its time from external time server? here is everything you need to know or do to make it work, KB816042

After you make this changes the PDC register will like this

W32Time configures the list of time sources through the following key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet

Services

W32Time

Parameters

NtpServer

time.windows.com,0x01 time.nist.gov,0x01

Click here to download reg file which will do this for you automatically

Thursday, January 7, 2010

If you have not completed part ne you will need to go back and fallow the steps.

I am going to show you guys how to complete some of the work from Go Daddy the cets there are very affordable somewhere $12 bucks per year, the process will be similar to other vendors as well..

We will Complete Certificate Signing Request ( CSR) as shown below

Now we go to go daddy log in click on SSL certificate

Click on manage certificate

Click Request certificate

At this point you need to wait e-mail will be sent from Go Daddy to domain registrar e-mail address, as soon as you get the e-mail you will see URL link to click on to download the certificate, if your certificate is denied for some reason you need to go back and make the corrections

After downloading the certificate place it on somewhere ( hard drive) on the server

I chose the same location and placed them on my CAS server as shown here now go back to server and complete the ending certificate request

I am going to browse to same directory

Happy ending , We no longer get the SSL warning as it is shown below.

Thanks to Exchange Team for making the Certificate process literally piece of cake , Exchange 2010 is incredibly surrounded with all these smart easy use tools not to mention fastest messaging application “EVER”

Enter Friendly name for the certificate ( anything you want this is for you to see and remember what this cert is for)

In this example we have one domain so wildcard certificate wont apply to here

Click next

Now Click the arrows to fill out the required information, this part is real nice easy to fallow we will click on Client Access server

Let me explain this a little bit so there is no confusion

The internal Domain Name space I use is SMTP25.local and server name is HTS01.SMTP25.Local

So my users internally can open their browser and type Http://mail.smtp25.local they will get to my exchange server and here how DNS A record internally look like

On the local Domain Controller / DNS

Open DNS Console

New Host A record

And type the IP address of the CAS server.

Pretty simple internal DNS query will be perform by client Browser will go to Internal DNS server and since we do have A record pointing to CAS server, Client browser will be directed to CAS server.

go back to Certificate wizard

I will Click next

Here is important, I have to pay attention to Common name, The common name is what clients will put into their browser when they are on outside of your network ( Internet) and this record must exist on the Public DNS server.

I created folder on C and give name to Certificate to make me remember what it is in the future

Now let’s get the certificate from C drive make right click open, open with notepad

This is end of part one , please read part two to complete the cert process